


The Last Dragon: Origins

by satbiym



Series: The Last Dragon [1]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Breaking of Dragon Eggs (Depicted Through Art) - Freeform, Dragon AU, Dragon Katsuki Yuuri, Explorer Victor Nikiforov, Famous Victor Nikiforov, Genocide (Depicted Through Art) - Freeform, M/M, Scientist Victor Nikiforov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 22:28:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20317045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satbiym/pseuds/satbiym
Summary: Listen, Victor didn’tintendto create a speculative evolutionary documentary about dragons because he - like everyone else - knew that dragons -flying, fire-breathing carnivorous beasts of myth and fantasy- didn’t exist.But upon being commissioned to make a serious documentary on dragons by a rich tycoon; famous scientist, Victor Nikiforov was determined to rise to the challenge and overcome all barriers that stood in his way; even if one of those barriers was the fact that dragons didn’t technicallyexist.(Right?)Written for the YOI Isekai Zine





	The Last Dragon: Origins

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys!
> 
> It's me back again with my dragon agenda!
> 
> I wrote this fic for the YOI Isekai Zine and I had a really fun time writing this (Even though I had to throw away a few drafts and this fic was a bit of a problem child for me until the very end)
> 
> This story is largely inspired by the documentary: [Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FIDeOOL52Q) (Check it out! It’s amazing!!). Every other scene is an excerpt from that documentary.
> 
> This fic is a collab with the ever amazing Cerise, you can find the art for this piece [here!](https://twitter.com/OpaleDeFeuAC/status/1163565734783410177)
> 
> Happy Reading!

_“Beware traveller, for here be dragons…”_

I sure fucking hope so, Victor thought as he pushed open the door plastered with warning signs, to the fenced off caves, the door creaking as it finally gave way to the force, until it finally broke in half and crumbled to the floor.

That seemed… metaphorical, Victor thought distantly.

Oh, well.

Victor strode in unhesitatingly, stepping over the remains of the door, leaving the light of the outside world behind for the silent, dark ambiguity of the caves.

* * *

_The Cretaceous period, a time when the world was ruled by the most fearsome predator that ever walked the earth—Tyrannosaurus rex. _

_The T-Rex has been forced to this remote place from his usual hunting grounds; something has been raiding his territory, and food has become scarce. He hasn't eaten for days, and it looks like this day will be the same, but the corner of his eyes catch a movement._

_At last, a potential kill._

_But the T-rex is cautious; he has never seen a creature like this before. Eventually, however, hunger drives him on—_

_He lunges. _

_The creature cries out loudly, the voice carrying for miles as the T-Rex flinches. The sound is incredibly painful to his sensitive ears, but he is still not deterred, and up here, there's nowhere to hide._

_He lunges again._

_But it is the T-Rex and not his prey that is fatally exposed, for you see... they are not alone._

_The cry wasn’t only meant to intimidate the T-Rex, a fact that becomes clear as a looming figure descends from the sky._

_This is an adult female, a fully grown prehistoric dragon. This is her territory and she's protecting her son._

* * *

Listen, Victor didn’t _intend _to create a speculative evolutionary documentary about dragons because he - like everyone else - knew that dragons - _flying, fire-breathing carnivorous beasts of myth and fantasy_ \- didn’t exist.

But when the man signing the checks for your research grant tells you to make a - get this - actual, _scientific, _exploratory documentary about dragons and what they _might _have been like _if _they had existed…

Let’s just say, one long conversation with a budding chemist who was also an amateur pyrotechnician and former fire-breather _(Don’t ask)_ later, Victor was now equipped with a lot more information about how one goes about generating fire from one’s mouth than he had ever thought he would need when he had decided to go into Paleontology at age eighteen.

But anyway.

This story isn’t about Victor or his aspirations about what his life was going to be like back when he still had a full head of hair.

(Spoiler Alert: It is.)

Neither is this about how much it chafed Victor to be a dancing monkey to the higher ups who held the purse strings and kept him from doing real, _verifiable_, scientific work.

(Spoiler Alert: It is.)

This story is going to be about Victor and his descent into academia’s Hall of Fame by pulling off the biggest pile of bullshit from nothing that anyone had ever seen.

This is going to be a story about _discovery_.

(Spoiler Alert: It is.)

* * *

_Two weeks have passed since his mother had saved him from the T-Rex and the young dragon is in trouble. _

_His mother is dead, the injury to her wing, inflicted by a wounded T-Rex in his last moments, proving fatal. The young dragon cannot fly, and with no one to hunt for him he too will die. _

_The smell from his mother's carcass is attracting scavengers; for the moment, they're just Pterosaurs, but who knows what other creatures may pick up the scent. _

_This dragon lost his mother at a critical moment. Somehow he has to teach himself to fly before it's too late, and if he does get airborne, it will be thanks to one of nature's most astonishing feats of Engineering._

* * *

The torch lasted ten minutes into the journey, light flickering with increasing frequency the longer Victor walked, until finally, the flickering halted for the last time, leaving Victor in the cold, darkness of the caves.

If Victor weren’t _Victor Nikiforov, Renowned Explorer, Paleontologist and Sexiest Man in Science _(Take that, Neil Degrasse Tyson!)_, _this would have been it. But Victor was every inch the explorer-scientist-heartthrob the media had painted him as, and while the last one wasn’t exactly related to this particular adventure, the first two were.

You see, the ancients might not have had the benefit of lithium batteries, but they did know the importance of replication and fire; every explored cave wall, no matter what the part of the world it was in, had one particular item in abundance.

“Gotcha!” Victor pulled the wooden staff off the wall of the cave and lit it with the matches he always carried for this exact situation, revealing the path forward, illuminated with bright, broadcasted light. But that wasn’t all that was revealed.

Victor gasped as his proximity to the cave wall shed light on something he had somehow missed, the sound echoing mockingly, trapped in the cave.

The wall was full of drawings!

And if the way they were arranged was any indication, they all seemed to be part of one larger piece, almost as if they were telling a story, with one leading to the next, almost like they were leading him somewhere…

The first painting, lovingly rendered and almost leaping off of the walls of the cave, seemed to be about a prosperous royal family, with the king and queen overseeing an empire of happy citizens, along with their children, a girl and a boy.

Victor walked on, following the wall, until the next painting revealed itself, similar in tone and subject. They were all about the family and their kingdom. The paintings seemed to be an inspiring account of a more prosperous time, possibly done by the people who lived here hundreds of years ago.

It was in the fourth painting when first Victor noticed it. The prince, whose face seemed to have been blurred out, possibly on account of bad paint and time, seemed to always be in the background of every single painting, almost like he was unwelcome or extraneous. The story, even though it seemed to be from the point of view of the prince (given the perspective of the paintings), never had him as the main character. Rather, it was the valiant looking knight or the dignified princess.

And then suddenly, as Victor happened upon the fifth painting, the mood changed.

The fifth painting denoted a famine that seemed to have ravaged the kingdom, leaving many weakened and some even dead. Victor clutched the staff tighter and hurried to the next painting, fearing the worst.

Only, the next painting wasn’t about the famine or the kingdom, rather, it was about large, winged beasts descending from the skies towards the nearby sheep.

_Dragons._

Victor looked at the two dragons, one blue and the other red, stealing livestock from the people of the kingdom, and even though he knew it was just a fictional account - to possibly explain vanishing livestock - he felt a curl of anger at the sight. The people of the kingdom were already suffering enough from the famine; they didn’t deserve to have more of their happiness threatened by the dragons. Victor hoped the next painting would be about the kingdom and not the dragons. They deserved their peace back.

Victor moved to the next painting, the biggest one yet, moving back to let the fire light all of it up.

Only upon seeing it all, Victor in his shock almost dropped the staff. For the painting was still about the dragons… but it was also about the kingdom. Wide-eyed, Victor trailed his eyes over the sequence of images depicting the blue dragon and his transformation into a familiar blurry image.

It was the prince!

The images continued, with the prince, now fully transformed into his human form, dragging his kill to a house with an old man and leaving it with him, right before turning back into his draconic form and flying away.

Victor could feel the hair on his arm rise with the implications of the last image, the silhouette of the dragon in the skies and the kingdom - the _dragon _kingdom - below.

It was… ludicrous! That transformation - it just wasn’t possible!

Victor carried on, knees shakier than before, but the last image seemed to be a lot further into the maze of caves.

But, before he could find the next painting, he hit a dead end, with a wall with symbols on it blocking his way. Victor backed away, until his eyes chanced upon another painting, but it didn’t contain the detail of the earlier paintings, with its characters depicted as rudimentary stick figures, possibly why Victor had missed it before.

Victor walked closer to examine it.

This painting was about a mass genocide.

Victor watched with horror as humans with crudely crafted weapons attacked the still-famine-weakened dragon kingdom, watching as the dragons were slaughtered, one by one.

Victor’s eyes caught upon the last image, one so cruel and final that his lifeless fingers couldn’t help but let go of his staff, uncaring as it rolled away.

The humans hadn’t even spared the dragon’s eggs, shattering them against the stone floor as the lifeless bodies of their parents lay nearby.

Victor felt a chill on his cheeks, and raised his hands to his face.

Oh, he was crying.

Wiping away his tears and berating himself for getting so overly attached to a far-fetched fictional story, Victor reached down for his wooden staff, only to see that it was lying against the wall in front of him.

Victor reached forward, but before he could, a gust of warm air threw him back, and he could only watch in horror as the flames from the staff started creeping up the walls of the cave as the symbols on the wall lit up, as if someone had lit it from behind. An eerie sound filled the cave, and it seemed like the ground itself was trembling with tension.

Victor knew he should be worried and fleeing for his life, but... something was going to happen, he could feel it.

The wall broke away, almost like it was split open, and from between the flames arose a massive figure, a creature that Victor had seen only in books and cave drawings…

_Dragon_.

The flames reflected along the blue scales of the dragon, as the creature drew up slowly, until it was completely engulfed in the flames, and the creature opened his eyes; brown, piercing and sharp.

Victor, who was still on the floor from when he had fallen, legs askew and hands behind him, was dwarfed by the majestic creature who was looking very much like an angry deity come to life for retribution.

And despite it all, Victor, for the life of him, couldn’t bring himself to regret his recent choices.

For in the arms of the flames, the blue dragon with his piercing brown eyes was not someone he could bring himself to regret meeting. Even if it was the last thing he would see before he died, he was glad to know there were still things in heaven and earth that could surprise him and that Science was just getting started.

* * *

_Unable to hunt, the young dragon exploits the only food available to him; his mother's meat will keep him alive for a few days, but if he can't fly, he can't hunt. His future looks bleak, yet even in death his mother may still help him. _

_In their gut, all creatures contain bacteria that help them break down food and as they do this they release gas, but the bacteria inside dragons are unique and the gas they produce is special. It is channeled into two storage chambers: the dragons flight bladders alongside the superlight skeleton. _

_These bladders provide the key to flight, provided you know how to use them._

_This young dragon would have to learn fast; the scent of his decomposing mother has attracted the most dangerous creature imaginable: an aging male dragon. Its broken horns and dull markings betray a dragon at the end of his days, and this is bad news for our juvenile; continuous battles over territory mean that most males never reach old age, but this dragon is still around, he's a survivor and he's hungry._

_The youngster senses that given the choice the older dragon would prefer fresh meat, and this time his mother isn't there to save him. His only hope is to take to the air._

* * *

If I am to die, Victor thought, let it be by the hands of a being no one thought could be real, let me die by the evidence of my misplaced hubris.

But it seemed killing was not at the forefront of the coiled dragon’s (!!!) mind, as the scaled, blue creature pinned Victor to his place on the ground with the force of his gaze alone and appeared to be considering his next course of action.

Victor, who was fully, justifiably expecting to die, saw the inch the dragon had unwittingly given him and decided to push his luck. Just because he was going to die, didn’t mean he couldn’t learn as much as he could before it!

So Victor pulled out the biggest weapon in his arsenal.

He smiled; an eager, bright thing that made no attempt to disguise his curiosity and delight.

“Hello! My name is Victor, what’s yours?” Victor said blythely.

The dragon reared its head back, like a kitten who had just tasted something sour and - predictably, although disappointingly - didn’t answer.

Victor pouted. “You gave away your secret through your art, you know. I _know _you can talk, so why don’t you transform and you can tell me what a nice dragon like you is doing in a place like this,” Victor said, following it up with a wink.

The dragon hissed, revealing sharp incisors, and - if Victor’s gaze wasn’t getting too spotty from fear - molars at the back of his mouth.

Wait.

_Molars?_

Dragons were carnivorous, weren’t they? What would the most fearsome predator in the world possibly need that many chewing teeth for? Stingrays had the same kind of teeth for crunching rock-hard shells, so maybe it could be for a similar purpose, but what…

Victor blinked, what was he doing! How often had he wished he could ask his specimen his questions, and now that he had gotten the chance to do so, he was wasting it by hypothesizing in his own head?!

Still smiling, Victor exclaimed, “Wow! What big teeth you have, My Dear Dragon! Question though, why do you have chewing teeth? Aren’t the teeth for shredding meat enough?”

The dragon blinked, and slammed his mouth shut with a noticeable _click_.

Victor blinked and resisting the urge to pout in disappointment, said “Aw, don’t be like that! I didn’t mean to make you self-conscious! I think your teeth are very pretty!”

At that, the dragon swiftly got up, long body twirling through the air like a ribbon, until he was aloft, aided only by his wings. Victor could only watch, wide eyed, as the dragon flew rapidly closer, until its long body was completely coiled around Victor’s, much like a turban.

Victor froze as the dragon’s head rested behind his shoulder, and his sharp teeth, previously a safe distance away, were placed on the side of Victor’s throat, right over his rapidly fluttering pulse.

_Probably wasn’t a good idea to remind a dragon about his meat shredding teeth right in front of my very available meat-y body. _

Looked like the dragon had decided his next course; Victor would have been happier if that course wasn’t going to be_ him_.

Victor closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable.

Only, instead of searing pain, he felt a wetness on his cheek.

“Eep!” Victor squealed, breaking out of his stillness to bat at the wetness. The dragon reared back at the attack, putting its tongue back from where it had been fondling (_tasting?!) _Victor’s cheek.

“What are you doing?! You can eat me, that’s fine, law of nature and all that, I get it! But I didn’t give you consent to_ lick _me, what the fuck?!” Victor said, effectively riled up as the dragon started backing away, brown eyes looking around, panicked.

“No, no, no, you cannot run away from this! Own up to it! R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to play with your food?!” Victor said heatedly.

At that, the dragon wilted, head lowering until it touched the ground, and closed his eyes, laying his paws on top of his head, the very image of petulance.

Victor, despite himself, felt guilty for having induced such a sorry image, and grudgingly said, turning away, “Alright, you can have another try at eating me, I guess. But _no licking _this time! Guess this way I’ll finally get to find out what those molars do myself, at least, since you aren’t willing to tell me about it yourself.” Victor laughed, morbidly amused.

At the resulting silence, Victor huffed out an exasperated breath, and taunted, “Come on then, My Dear Dragon, any longer and I’m going to perish, standing here by my lonesome, and then where will we be? Why I-”

“My _name _is Prince Katsuki Yuuri of Hasetsu. I’m not your dear _anything._” A steely voice spoke behind Victor, interrupting him and anything he might have had to say for effectively… forever.

Victor slowly turned, unable to believe the image of a lithe man glaring up at him from the ground, sitting in the same spot previously occupied by a blue dragon.

“And I’ll have you know, your bony little body wouldn’t even come close to feeding me. I wouldn’t eat you if you were the last walking, meatbag in this world,” the Prince continued, voice full of obvious disdain, pretty brown eyes still glaring holes at Victor.

Victor felt a curl of _something _in his stomach.

Oh, _oh_, this was going to get complicated.

* * *

_The juvenile heads for the trees, for the old male cannot fly there. Inside, the dragon's body is working overtime, heart beating, muscles pumping, and hydrogen is collecting at a phenomenal rate. The youngster’s flight bladders are now full, but crucially so is his stomach. _

_But the undigested meat is weighing him down. The older dragon is closing in and so is the edge of the cliff…_

_Just in time, instinct takes over, the younger dragon empties his stomach and spreads his wings over the edge. _

_Exhausted, the old male abandons chase, watching our young dragon, who has found his wings, just in time and for the very first time in his life, flies away. _

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked that! If you did, I'd love to hear from you below in the comments or on social media!
> 
> I am on...  
[Tumblr](http://satbiym.tumblr.com), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/satbiym),[Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/satbiym) or even Discord if you're so inclined!
> 
> **IMPORTANT NOTE**  
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